To all those idiots out there who think that there is going to be a security issue with this bit...you need to be beaten with a clue-by-four.
What do you think the uranium producers are going to do, ship it to your house vie UPS or FedEx? Come on...it's not like they're going to ship this to just anyone. It's just a lot harder to fly all the uranium buyers to an auction than it is to use a web site.
So say someone does break in and tries to buy reactor grade uranium. When they list their address as:
Osama Bin Laden
123 Main St. Apt. 4
Somewhere in Afganistan
It's prolly NOT going to be delivered. You trigger happy morons deserve nothing but flame for not thinking through your comments. You're just like a tabloid...if you can sensationalize it, print it. This is very similar to a Chicago suburb getting all in a fit because the U.S. Navy wanted to ship napalm through their town on it's way to be destroyed. Never mind the fact that they allow tankers full of sulfuric acid and chlorine through there all the time...
Luddites, be damned...be damned to the eternal stoneage you would rather have.
Who says there's a barrier? Ever seen a product or technology become oh-so-much-cooler because someone thought of a new use for it? This will continue to happen for eternity...or till you and me are dead and no longer care!;-)
...sued Microsoft? What is it with these 28 states? Did all the Attorneys General go to the same law school or something? I don't get it, why would only 28 states sue? Do record and softare companies only operate in these 28 states? If anyone has any enlightenment to spread, I'd much appreciate it...
I've seen a couple of comments here suggesting that Hotmail be slashdotted. How the hell are you going to accomplish this? How many users is Hotmail up to now? Last I heard it was over 40 million....how do you figure the couple of hundred thousand (that's being VERY generous)/. readers are even going to make Hotmail's servers even hiccup? You'd have about as much luck as/.-ing Yahoo...
Not only that, but you can get seriously shitcanned for mail fraud. Interrupting and intercepting mail that is not addressed to you is a federal offense. We're not talking nickel and dime prison sentences here either. I happen to think that USPS email is a great idea. It would bring regulation to the email system.
Yeah, but just wait until you have 5 billion different email addresses to differentiate from. I think email addresses are going to become more and more complicated than you think...
I've read the Beowulf FAQ and have seen that exact question you've referenced in the above post. Have you seen the General Electric (or whatever big company...) commercials with the refridgerators that have the barcode scanners and the web browser so that Nancy Good American can scan in her empty sour cream container when she runs out? The refrigerator then shows the order on her web browser built into the door of the refrigerator and she confirms the order which is then sent out the ethernet (i'm guessing/embellishing here now) port in the back of the refrigerator, into her home tcpip network, then routed to the Internet and finally to Peapod/WebVan/Homegrocer.com to fulfill the order? I hardly think that a 386, 486, or even a PII is going to be able to handle a task like that with any sort of respectable speed. Especially when the hard drive in the fridge that stores order historys and customer preferences needs to run as well. I don't think embedded is going to be the way to go with these things. I really think that Transmeta (if they last that long) will be able to capture a large part of a market like this.
Author of the comment concerning the Beowulf FAQ, please disregard this rant as you have the only enlightened reply to my original post.
RANT ON:
As to all of you bitching that SMP already takes care of a distributed architecture:
Does SMP handle the latencies encountered when routing messages through ethernet cards? No.
Does SMP handle the reordering of packets when they come back at way different (I'm talking several seconds, not microseconds here) times and in different orders? No.
How can you compare a 100Mhz bus to a distributed architecture? You cant. They are completely different animals with different needs. 100 Mhz buses have caches and low latencies. Distributed architectures work on scales that are completely different than the inside of a microcomputer. Beowulf is perhaps the closest thing we have to a valid distributed architecture (for linux at least) and as far as I know it is not set up to work through routers/firewalls/shared media hubs/etc.
Do any of you app developers have any concept of what a good sysadmin/hardware engineer has to deal with on a daily basis? It certainly doesn't seem so.
RANT OFF:
Please moderate this to hell to your hearts content. The intended victims of my rant will still see it in the thread replies...
Having a distributed OS would take a great load off of distributed application developers. Currently, a distributed application has to be able to handle all the tasks that a normal operating system currently does. Not having a distributed operating system for distributed apps is like not having an OS for normal client apps.
Seti@Home has to be able to route all its necessary functions and information around its network. Why is that necessary? A distributed operating system should be able to handle the tasks of distribution for the applications. It's almost as if every distributed app developer has to re-invent the wheel every time he/she wants to create such an app. Why do you think there aren't many distributed apps out there? They're too bloody hard to code. Joe Schmoe VB developer cannot create distributed apps because like as not, he knows very little about networking. Most developers know squat about networking (keep in mind that most developers don't read/., so I'm not referring to YOU).
Soon, every appliance in your abode is going to have a processor in it. That processor may be much more powerful than what is really necessary to operate the appliance. Especially if a web browser is built into your fridge. The processor has to be able to run the browser, so lets say it's Pentium class. Do you really need a Pentium to measure the temperature of the fridge and turn on the compressor? No. So every time the browser is not being used, clock cycles are wasted.
I see no reason why future homes don't have the standard PC. They could use the collective power of all the processors in all of the appliances in the home to make a PC-type of interface for a user. It would also lend a certain amount of fault tolerance. Many functions would be duplicated on the home network, and data loss and downtime would be minimal if at all.
It's not the consumer that is paying the piper for the garbage that the music industry foists upon us. It's the music industry that is paying for their mistakes.
Collectively, the music industry is breathing a sigh of relief that mp3's are not CD quality. They are also relieved that so few people have computers with good enough speakers (relatively) to bother listening to music purely on their computer. But they know what is around the corner. Sire/Reprise, Time Warner, BMG, you better start saving your pennies now, because the consumer is no longer going to tolerate your abuse.
I do understand your point, I just don't think that such a device would be viable in today's market. Considering that one can purchase PDA's (read: Palm & Handspring) that cost only a couple of hundred dollars that can cover most tasks that I can think of that a device like this is suited to. I cannot see someone paying $1000+ for a large, fast processor, big hard drive, big viewscreen, etc.
To counter your complaint about switching between mouse and keyboard, I think we would be better off pushing an easy to use one-handed keyboard. I believe there is such a device available on the commercial market. I do know that an F-16 pilot has such a device that can be used to type one-handed with his/her left hand and fly with the right hand. I think it may be difficult to master such a device, but prolly no more so than the qwerty keyboard.
This would not be a good idea in my mind. A lot of creative types prefer the powerbook to any x86 offering, and not having a keyboard is going to slow their productivity. Unless there is some super effective voice recognition software that Apple has not told us about, this concept will fail.
I know a lot of people that could never consider a non-keyboard laptop. Who ever heard of writing 60 words per minute...or more? 60's just how fast I type. I've seen good typists go to 180 wpm. There's no possible way to get that with a stylus...
Where do you get that I assume that competitive societies are the standard? I use a comparison of two societies based upon economic prowess. China has vast land and human capital resources at their disposal. Their society leans toward cooperation (this is changing though, as witnessed by the rapid expansion of the Chinese economy) as opposed to competition. The society based in the United States is the other way around. The Gross Domestic Product of China is but a fraction of that of the United States. Economically, the competitive model that the United States is based upon is more advantageous than the model that China is base upon.
As well, a number of Chinese people I've talked to have complained of the U.S. trying to force values on their society that they don't believe in.
You're trying to turn a factual arguement into a moral one. I'm not trying to say that one society's morals are better than the other, I'm using each as a point of reference based upon economics.
My arguement has nothing to do with whether or not American values are beneficial or warranted around the globe. My arguement is grounded in the circumstances that our little world has to deal with on a daily basis. Many of those circumstances are based around human nature. For instance, it is human nature to want to improve one's station in life. Take a look at Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs. Physiological and Safety needs top the list. Accumulating wealth allows humans to fulfill these needs. Accumulating vast amounts of wealth puts humans in positions where they hardly need ever worry about whether or not they are going to eat the next day.
You say I do not support my arguement that China's economy and standard of living are unequal to that of the United States. It has nothing to do with American values. You seem to be confusing economic advantage with a morality play again. Speaking in strictly economic terms, the economy of the United States allows the U.S. to be able to produce more tools and derive more productivity per capita than China. I'm not trying to say that the U.S. is better off because more people in the U.S. have a car or a television than in China. I'm trying to say that the U.S. is better off than China because we have the capability to produce laser lithography machines to improve the speed of microprocessors. Our manufacturing sector is the most advanced in the world. Machines, such as earthmovers and other infrastructure building equipment are shipped from the U.S. to everywhere in the world because the U.S. has the ability to make these tools better than anyone else.
China simply does not have the economic muscle to build a freeway system similar to that of the United States. They will eventually do it, but it will take years. China's collective style of society (not government) puts them at a competitive disadvantage when compared economically to the United States.
Banning IP property rights would not result in your above scenario. What it would result in is Obscurotech paying off a couple of Intel engineers to take the designs of Intel's processors to Obscurotech and your six month turnaround shortly turns into six days. Intel, because they have no legal recourse against their employees who "procure" such information for Obscurotech, could do nothing more than sack any employee that was caught sleeping with the enemy. Of course, whomever took the technology from Intel could hardly care, because they prolly just pocketed a cool $50 million USD from Obscurotech. Everyone here but Intel wins. Obscurotech gets away with Intel's designs and manufacturing process for a sum of money that is little more than a couple of percentage points of what Intel paid to discover the technology in the first place.
You say that IP stifles competition by stopping people from using ideas they know will work. I counter that AMD has benefited from the fact that Intel would not allow them to use their chip designs, therefore, AMD came up with a new chip design, which (in my mind at least) is better than what Intel has to offer.
I know, I know, here comes the flame, but I have some comments about this paper that I have to share and many of you may not like.
First off, I'll admit that I have not read the entire treatise, and mostly because of this:
The government's power to grant a monopoly is corrupting.
This is the third sentence of the second paragraph. I really dislike persuasive papers that delve into opinion so early in their arguments. Granted, most persuasive arguements have their basis in opinion, but good persuasive arguements go to great lengths to give basis to that opinion. Starting out the issue with a flat and unsupported opinion is bad form. There is no logic in nor attempt to explain the premise "The government's power to grant a monopoly is corrupting."
I've looked down through the arguements...here's one I don't like:
It(intellectual property) fosters competitiveness over information and ideas, whereas cooperation makes much more sense.
Why does cooperation make more sense? There is no support to that premise, and therefore, the statement is not using the correct logic that is necessary to support a valid arguement.
I would counter that cooperation does not make more sense, as proven that collective societies cannot compete with competitive societies by the fall of the collectively based governments in Eastern Europe. Take that further with China, which arguably has much more access to resources than the United States, but the United States has used competition to exploit the resources available to it in a more efficient manner and thus produce an economy and standard of living for its citizens that China will not equal for decades.
The neem tree arguement was taken from a publication about intellectual piracy. I won't argue that the patenting of the products of the tree is piracy, I believe that it is, but I certainly don't believe that it is a good arguement against intellectual property. All kinds of similar piracy goes on all over the world, not the least of which is IP piracy. Take DeBeers for instance. DeBeers controls much of the diamond mining concessions on the African continent, and the peoples of the countries that give/sell those concessions to DeBeers receive very little in return for the billions of dollars worth of diamonds that DeBeers pillages from them. The same thing happens with petrochemical resources in Africa. I always hear about Western oil companies operating in Africa, but I know of no "African" oil companies.
Perhaps some of the arguements presented in this paper are good arguements for reform of IP laws, but not the condemnation of IP itself. Companies like Intel and AMD would have little incentive to innovate if not allowed to patent their chip designs. That goes for just about every other major manufacturing industry in the world. Why should Intel spend billions of dollars on research when they are forced to turn that research over to AMD in the spirit of cooperation.
This paper takes a too altruistic view of the human animal. The arguements presented here assume that humans can be converted into honest and righteous characters. The truth is, people lie, cheat, steal and murder in order to better their own ends. Keeping a grasp on intellectual property is much less of an evil that the arguement presented in this paper would have you belive.
Somebody modded this up and I've got karma to burn. I saw this moronic post and just have to flame the living shit out of it.
Flame to all of you idiot moderators that gave this guy points. Jet engines? Do any of you possibly have any idea about the differences in the amount of thrust that comes out of a rocket engine versus a jet engine? Let me spell it out for you:
Now, there are 5 F-1 engines on a Saturn V's first stage. Say we assume that liquid oxygen is 70% of the rocket's weight (it's not, but that's for another discussion). That leaves only the need for one F-1 rocket engine delivering 1.6 million pounds of thrust.
Math:
Let's use an F-16 engine for comparison. It is considerably smaller than the large powerplants on, say, a 747, but could be clustered into less space than such engines, but I digress...
F-16C/D: one Pratt and Whitney F100-PW-200/220/229 or one General Electric F110-GE-100/129
Produces:
F-16C/D, 27,000 pounds(12,150 kilograms) of thrust.
Even giving the rounding errors to the jet engine we arrive at:
1,600,000 / 27,000 = 59.259blahblahblah
So, to equal the thrust of one F-1 rocket engine on the Saturn V, we would need to strap roughly 60 F-16 engines (Of the present day...mind you) to the launch vehicle.
Toss aside the fact that 60 of these engines are going to weigh much more than one F-1 engine, nevermind the extremely complicated fuel systems necessary to pump the volume of fuel that they would consume at full afterburner. I therefore deduce that you all are idiots because this is soooooo obvious!!! Duh?
My only regret is that this is an old story and hardly anyone is going to read my tirade.
"So far, his bet seemed to be paying off. Marsha DeFilippo, an aide who is working with King on the project, said that as of Monday afternoon there had been about 34,000 downloads and that about 75 percent of the users were paying their dollar right away by credit card. Readers also have the option of mailing payments to a post office box."
I'm sure we'd all love the home phone number of the jag-off at ABC who dreamt this wonderful scheme up. Really, any high level executive's phone number will do. When's the last time someone like this got their telephone slashdotted?
I've been getting this stuff for a couple of weeks now. I've never gotten a message on my voice mail, but it does seem to be some automated thing calling me and hanging up.
I can't stand this kind of crap. I live and work not too far from L.A., something like this on my answering machine would have me finding ABC here in town and giving them what for. It's bad enough when automated telemarketing systems call me and expect me to listen to a recording.
Just after 1992 the little drugstore down the street in Normal, IL (Illinois State), sold new release CD's from between $10.99 and $12.99...or something very close to that. The last time I popped into a record store at University of Illinois, almost everything was over $15 and a record store in the loop in Chicago sold me Fatboy Slim's latest for $18. Best Buy is still the best retail joint to buy from, but they are starting to get into that $13-15 range rather than the $11-12 range a couple of years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall down an open manhole cover and die.
To all those idiots out there who think that there is going to be a security issue with this bit...you need to be beaten with a clue-by-four.
What do you think the uranium producers are going to do, ship it to your house vie UPS or FedEx? Come on...it's not like they're going to ship this to just anyone. It's just a lot harder to fly all the uranium buyers to an auction than it is to use a web site.
So say someone does break in and tries to buy reactor grade uranium. When they list their address as:
Osama Bin Laden
123 Main St. Apt. 4
Somewhere in Afganistan
It's prolly NOT going to be delivered. You trigger happy morons deserve nothing but flame for not thinking through your comments. You're just like a tabloid...if you can sensationalize it, print it. This is very similar to a Chicago suburb getting all in a fit because the U.S. Navy wanted to ship napalm through their town on it's way to be destroyed. Never mind the fact that they allow tankers full of sulfuric acid and chlorine through there all the time...
Luddites, be damned...be damned to the eternal stoneage you would rather have.
Who says there's a barrier? Ever seen a product or technology become oh-so-much-cooler because someone thought of a new use for it? This will continue to happen for eternity...or till you and me are dead and no longer care! ;-)
...sued Microsoft? What is it with these 28 states? Did all the Attorneys General go to the same law school or something? I don't get it, why would only 28 states sue? Do record and softare companies only operate in these 28 states? If anyone has any enlightenment to spread, I'd much appreciate it...
Uhhh...NASA's already done this successfully....How do you think Surveryor landed?
I've seen a couple of comments here suggesting that Hotmail be slashdotted. How the hell are you going to accomplish this? How many users is Hotmail up to now? Last I heard it was over 40 million....how do you figure the couple of hundred thousand (that's being VERY generous) /. readers are even going to make Hotmail's servers even hiccup? You'd have about as much luck as /.-ing Yahoo...
Ho...oh...ha...heh...I didn't read this straight the first time through. That's funny...
Not only that, but you can get seriously shitcanned for mail fraud. Interrupting and intercepting mail that is not addressed to you is a federal offense. We're not talking nickel and dime prison sentences here either. I happen to think that USPS email is a great idea. It would bring regulation to the email system.
Yeah, but just wait until you have 5 billion different email addresses to differentiate from. I think email addresses are going to become more and more complicated than you think...
I've read the Beowulf FAQ and have seen that exact question you've referenced in the above post. Have you seen the General Electric (or whatever big company...) commercials with the refridgerators that have the barcode scanners and the web browser so that Nancy Good American can scan in her empty sour cream container when she runs out? The refrigerator then shows the order on her web browser built into the door of the refrigerator and she confirms the order which is then sent out the ethernet (i'm guessing/embellishing here now) port in the back of the refrigerator, into her home tcpip network, then routed to the Internet and finally to Peapod/WebVan/Homegrocer.com to fulfill the order? I hardly think that a 386, 486, or even a PII is going to be able to handle a task like that with any sort of respectable speed. Especially when the hard drive in the fridge that stores order historys and customer preferences needs to run as well. I don't think embedded is going to be the way to go with these things. I really think that Transmeta (if they last that long) will be able to capture a large part of a market like this.
Author of the comment concerning the Beowulf FAQ, please disregard this rant as you have the only enlightened reply to my original post.
RANT ON:
As to all of you bitching that SMP already takes care of a distributed architecture:
Does SMP handle the latencies encountered when routing messages through ethernet cards? No.
Does SMP handle the reordering of packets when they come back at way different (I'm talking several seconds, not microseconds here) times and in different orders? No.
How can you compare a 100Mhz bus to a distributed architecture? You cant. They are completely different animals with different needs. 100 Mhz buses have caches and low latencies. Distributed architectures work on scales that are completely different than the inside of a microcomputer. Beowulf is perhaps the closest thing we have to a valid distributed architecture (for linux at least) and as far as I know it is not set up to work through routers/firewalls/shared media hubs/etc.
Do any of you app developers have any concept of what a good sysadmin/hardware engineer has to deal with on a daily basis? It certainly doesn't seem so.
RANT OFF:
Please moderate this to hell to your hearts content. The intended victims of my rant will still see it in the thread replies...
Having a distributed OS would take a great load off of distributed application developers. Currently, a distributed application has to be able to handle all the tasks that a normal operating system currently does. Not having a distributed operating system for distributed apps is like not having an OS for normal client apps.
/., so I'm not referring to YOU).
Seti@Home has to be able to route all its necessary functions and information around its network. Why is that necessary? A distributed operating system should be able to handle the tasks of distribution for the applications. It's almost as if every distributed app developer has to re-invent the wheel every time he/she wants to create such an app. Why do you think there aren't many distributed apps out there? They're too bloody hard to code. Joe Schmoe VB developer cannot create distributed apps because like as not, he knows very little about networking. Most developers know squat about networking (keep in mind that most developers don't read
Soon, every appliance in your abode is going to have a processor in it. That processor may be much more powerful than what is really necessary to operate the appliance. Especially if a web browser is built into your fridge. The processor has to be able to run the browser, so lets say it's Pentium class. Do you really need a Pentium to measure the temperature of the fridge and turn on the compressor? No. So every time the browser is not being used, clock cycles are wasted.
I see no reason why future homes don't have the standard PC. They could use the collective power of all the processors in all of the appliances in the home to make a PC-type of interface for a user. It would also lend a certain amount of fault tolerance. Many functions would be duplicated on the home network, and data loss and downtime would be minimal if at all.
I think you're right...damn nesting bs...
Which post is this a reply to? It seems that you are trying to reply to me, but your last sentence argrees with my arguement? I'm confused?
It's not the consumer that is paying the piper for the garbage that the music industry foists upon us. It's the music industry that is paying for their mistakes.
Collectively, the music industry is breathing a sigh of relief that mp3's are not CD quality. They are also relieved that so few people have computers with good enough speakers (relatively) to bother listening to music purely on their computer. But they know what is around the corner. Sire/Reprise, Time Warner, BMG, you better start saving your pennies now, because the consumer is no longer going to tolerate your abuse.
I do understand your point, I just don't think that such a device would be viable in today's market. Considering that one can purchase PDA's (read: Palm & Handspring) that cost only a couple of hundred dollars that can cover most tasks that I can think of that a device like this is suited to. I cannot see someone paying $1000+ for a large, fast processor, big hard drive, big viewscreen, etc.
To counter your complaint about switching between mouse and keyboard, I think we would be better off pushing an easy to use one-handed keyboard. I believe there is such a device available on the commercial market. I do know that an F-16 pilot has such a device that can be used to type one-handed with his/her left hand and fly with the right hand. I think it may be difficult to master such a device, but prolly no more so than the qwerty keyboard.
This would not be a good idea in my mind. A lot of creative types prefer the powerbook to any x86 offering, and not having a keyboard is going to slow their productivity. Unless there is some super effective voice recognition software that Apple has not told us about, this concept will fail.
I know a lot of people that could never consider a non-keyboard laptop. Who ever heard of writing 60 words per minute...or more? 60's just how fast I type. I've seen good typists go to 180 wpm. There's no possible way to get that with a stylus...
Touche.
Where do you get that I assume that competitive societies are the standard? I use a comparison of two societies based upon economic prowess. China has vast land and human capital resources at their disposal. Their society leans toward cooperation (this is changing though, as witnessed by the rapid expansion of the Chinese economy) as opposed to competition. The society based in the United States is the other way around. The Gross Domestic Product of China is but a fraction of that of the United States. Economically, the competitive model that the United States is based upon is more advantageous than the model that China is base upon.
As well, a number of Chinese people I've talked to have complained of the U.S. trying to force values on their society that they don't believe in.
You're trying to turn a factual arguement into a moral one. I'm not trying to say that one society's morals are better than the other, I'm using each as a point of reference based upon economics.
My arguement has nothing to do with whether or not American values are beneficial or warranted around the globe. My arguement is grounded in the circumstances that our little world has to deal with on a daily basis. Many of those circumstances are based around human nature. For instance, it is human nature to want to improve one's station in life. Take a look at Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs. Physiological and Safety needs top the list. Accumulating wealth allows humans to fulfill these needs. Accumulating vast amounts of wealth puts humans in positions where they hardly need ever worry about whether or not they are going to eat the next day.
You say I do not support my arguement that China's economy and standard of living are unequal to that of the United States. It has nothing to do with American values. You seem to be confusing economic advantage with a morality play again. Speaking in strictly economic terms, the economy of the United States allows the U.S. to be able to produce more tools and derive more productivity per capita than China. I'm not trying to say that the U.S. is better off because more people in the U.S. have a car or a television than in China. I'm trying to say that the U.S. is better off than China because we have the capability to produce laser lithography machines to improve the speed of microprocessors. Our manufacturing sector is the most advanced in the world. Machines, such as earthmovers and other infrastructure building equipment are shipped from the U.S. to everywhere in the world because the U.S. has the ability to make these tools better than anyone else.
China simply does not have the economic muscle to build a freeway system similar to that of the United States. They will eventually do it, but it will take years. China's collective style of society (not government) puts them at a competitive disadvantage when compared economically to the United States.
Banning IP property rights would not result in your above scenario. What it would result in is Obscurotech paying off a couple of Intel engineers to take the designs of Intel's processors to Obscurotech and your six month turnaround shortly turns into six days. Intel, because they have no legal recourse against their employees who "procure" such information for Obscurotech, could do nothing more than sack any employee that was caught sleeping with the enemy. Of course, whomever took the technology from Intel could hardly care, because they prolly just pocketed a cool $50 million USD from Obscurotech. Everyone here but Intel wins. Obscurotech gets away with Intel's designs and manufacturing process for a sum of money that is little more than a couple of percentage points of what Intel paid to discover the technology in the first place.
You say that IP stifles competition by stopping people from using ideas they know will work. I counter that AMD has benefited from the fact that Intel would not allow them to use their chip designs, therefore, AMD came up with a new chip design, which (in my mind at least) is better than what Intel has to offer.
I know, I know, here comes the flame, but I have some comments about this paper that I have to share and many of you may not like.
First off, I'll admit that I have not read the entire treatise, and mostly because of this:
The government's power to grant a monopoly is corrupting.
This is the third sentence of the second paragraph. I really dislike persuasive papers that delve into opinion so early in their arguments. Granted, most persuasive arguements have their basis in opinion, but good persuasive arguements go to great lengths to give basis to that opinion. Starting out the issue with a flat and unsupported opinion is bad form. There is no logic in nor attempt to explain the premise "The government's power to grant a monopoly is corrupting."
I've looked down through the arguements...here's one I don't like:
It(intellectual property) fosters competitiveness over information and ideas, whereas cooperation makes much more sense.
Why does cooperation make more sense? There is no support to that premise, and therefore, the statement is not using the correct logic that is necessary to support a valid arguement.
I would counter that cooperation does not make more sense, as proven that collective societies cannot compete with competitive societies by the fall of the collectively based governments in Eastern Europe. Take that further with China, which arguably has much more access to resources than the United States, but the United States has used competition to exploit the resources available to it in a more efficient manner and thus produce an economy and standard of living for its citizens that China will not equal for decades.
The neem tree arguement was taken from a publication about intellectual piracy. I won't argue that the patenting of the products of the tree is piracy, I believe that it is, but I certainly don't believe that it is a good arguement against intellectual property. All kinds of similar piracy goes on all over the world, not the least of which is IP piracy. Take DeBeers for instance. DeBeers controls much of the diamond mining concessions on the African continent, and the peoples of the countries that give/sell those concessions to DeBeers receive very little in return for the billions of dollars worth of diamonds that DeBeers pillages from them. The same thing happens with petrochemical resources in Africa. I always hear about Western oil companies operating in Africa, but I know of no "African" oil companies.
Perhaps some of the arguements presented in this paper are good arguements for reform of IP laws, but not the condemnation of IP itself. Companies like Intel and AMD would have little incentive to innovate if not allowed to patent their chip designs. That goes for just about every other major manufacturing industry in the world. Why should Intel spend billions of dollars on research when they are forced to turn that research over to AMD in the spirit of cooperation.
This paper takes a too altruistic view of the human animal. The arguements presented here assume that humans can be converted into honest and righteous characters. The truth is, people lie, cheat, steal and murder in order to better their own ends. Keeping a grasp on intellectual property is much less of an evil that the arguement presented in this paper would have you belive.
Somebody modded this up and I've got karma to burn. I saw this moronic post and just have to flame the living shit out of it.
Flame to all of you idiot moderators that gave this guy points. Jet engines? Do any of you possibly have any idea about the differences in the amount of thrust that comes out of a rocket engine versus a jet engine? Let me spell it out for you:
Take the Saturn V...
06 April 1961 - 1,640 million pounds of thrust achieved in static- firing of the F-1 engine.
Now, there are 5 F-1 engines on a Saturn V's first stage. Say we assume that liquid oxygen is 70% of the rocket's weight (it's not, but that's for another discussion). That leaves only the need for one F-1 rocket engine delivering 1.6 million pounds of thrust.
Math:
Let's use an F-16 engine for comparison. It is considerably smaller than the large powerplants on, say, a 747, but could be clustered into less space than such engines, but I digress...
F-16C/D:
one Pratt and Whitney F100-PW-200/220/229 or
one General Electric F110-GE-100/129
Produces:
F-16C/D, 27,000 pounds(12,150 kilograms) of thrust.
Even giving the rounding errors to the jet engine we arrive at:
1,600,000 / 27,000 = 59.259blahblahblah
So, to equal the thrust of one F-1 rocket engine on the Saturn V, we would need to strap roughly 60 F-16 engines (Of the present day...mind you) to the launch vehicle.
Toss aside the fact that 60 of these engines are going to weigh much more than one F-1 engine, nevermind the extremely complicated fuel systems necessary to pump the volume of fuel that they would consume at full afterburner. I therefore deduce that you all are idiots because this is soooooo obvious!!! Duh?
My only regret is that this is an old story and hardly anyone is going to read my tirade.
Excerpt from a story on Yahoo.
"So far, his bet seemed to be paying off. Marsha DeFilippo, an aide who is working with King on the project, said that as of Monday afternoon there had been about 34,000 downloads and that about 75 percent of the users were paying their dollar right away by credit card. Readers also have the option of mailing payments to a post office box."
I'm sure we'd all love the home phone number of the jag-off at ABC who dreamt this wonderful scheme up. Really, any high level executive's phone number will do. When's the last time someone like this got their telephone slashdotted?
I've been getting this stuff for a couple of weeks now. I've never gotten a message on my voice mail, but it does seem to be some automated thing calling me and hanging up.
I can't stand this kind of crap. I live and work not too far from L.A., something like this on my answering machine would have me finding ABC here in town and giving them what for. It's bad enough when automated telemarketing systems call me and expect me to listen to a recording.
Just after 1992 the little drugstore down the street in Normal, IL (Illinois State), sold new release CD's from between $10.99 and $12.99...or something very close to that. The last time I popped into a record store at University of Illinois, almost everything was over $15 and a record store in the loop in Chicago sold me Fatboy Slim's latest for $18. Best Buy is still the best retail joint to buy from, but they are starting to get into that $13-15 range rather than the $11-12 range a couple of years ago.